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I think I have LLM burnout

alecscollon.com

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Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#251

Post by zahlman »

ssl-3 wrote: post #221
block_dagger wrote: post #25

I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.

" That's such a clever way to see things! Let's delve into that! " The bots (all of them) seem to show patterns of overuse of specific phrases, words, and punctuation. Some of those are the ones you mentioned. Another that I've been seeing lately is overuse of the term "gate", wherein: As a human, I know what a gate is. A gate is a thing that can be open, or that can be closed. It might be locked or unlocked. The pat…

This makes more sense if you think about the contexts in which people would talk about gates on the Internet, I dare say.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#252

Post by trollbridge »

soonnow wrote: post #187
woutr_be wrote: post #106

I’m currently doing a project with someone who only uses LLMs, and it’s exhausting and mentally draining. Whenever I give feedback on something, the answer is just “let me tell Claude”. The person has no understanding of how everything works, and most of the code reflects that. The other day he hardcoded in a demo mode, simply because he didn’t even know how to set up a local environment and set environment variables…

I'm the same as you. Very specific tasks. Just now I spent two hours in a conversation with claude code to change 5 lines of code that change a significant semantic. On the other hand my buddy is spending $10k in tokens a day on agents to build something. He's a very smart guy, former developer so it's not just AI psychosis talking. Still trying to figure it out. Not that I have $10k to spend.

What on earth is he doing with $2.6M in token burn per year? That's at the level where he is running multiple simultaneous frontier models 24/7.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#253

Post by sph »

springtimesun wrote: post #208

I am feeling very tired. Since I’ve started working with LLMs my output as a solo dev has easily gone up 20x. I’m closing client projects including ones that previously would have been far too ambitious to take on alone. Long running codebases are getting features that have dragged out for months or been sitting in the planning stages for even longer. And overall quality is way up now with more complete (and honestly…

So the choice is squeezing every ounce of productivity out of me I didn’t even know I had before, burning myself out faster for likely the same amount of money (I doubt you are earning 20x) and not even having the pleasure of coding but just having to argue with a stupid machine that doesn’t even have the decency to get tired or frustrated, yet always falls short of the mark

OR

just keep coding by hand, thinking things in front of a whiteboard when it gets complicated, burning myself out slowly at a more humane pace as we have done for 50+ years of software engineering.

Why is this even a choice? I mean, serious question, do you people have a little bit of self-respect? I am expecting the excuse of “but my boss expects me to use AI”. It is clear most of you have not experienced true burnout, because it’s going to be a world of pain when it hits. Stop turning yourself into machines. You are not.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#255

Post by PeterStuer »

"My main project right now is to establish a framework for large-scale, unsupervised code generation in our codebase... sifting through the unsupervised agent’s (Qwen’s) output"

Ouch. I love my local AI setup with Qwen, but that is a mismatch right there. That model is not the right match for that project. It's like trying to develop a major software solution by just throwing in hundreds of fresh junior programmers and have them spew out random code bits, while what you needed is a good PM, a great architect and a handfull of senior engineers. Might as well pack it in for a year until your model has grown into the ability for those rolls. There is a reason why Opus 4.6 and now Fable dramatically changed the SWE capabilities, and IMHO Qwen is not there yet.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#256

Post by alfiedotwtf »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #13

I don't think I have a "burnout", but LLMs are really exhausting due to amount of pressure they generate. No one is really pushing me to increase my workload, but at every moment there is always something ready, done by my clankers or clankers of other people that I could be unblocking. In the past (before LLMs) it was already hard to keep up, but now it feels like there's 10x more things waiting at any given time, a…

> I've noticed LLMs feed my unhealthy "don't want to take a break and waste time being idle" mindset, and I need to correct it.

Embrace it if you’re like me and feel uncomfortable having an idle mind, embrace it! You’ll get more done and being 120% go go go is impossible over the long run so eventually your body will just say I need a break then once you recover full steam head again on the treadmill

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#257

Post by sph »

dminik wrote: post #234
infinite_spin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not whatever the hell this is. do you mean my enjoyment from building things? I'm genuinely confused by this response.

Yes, there are generally two kinds of people: Those who like having a finished thing. Product people. These people love LLMs. Those who love the process of building a thing, working through a problem, learning something new. Finishing a project is generally not required. For them LLMs are soul sucking hell.

Yeah, the people that recognize progress is through effort and mastery, and those that would gladly do away with effort, quality be damned.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#258

Post by zahlman »

jedbrooke wrote: post #236

> Some small part of me has started to dread reading LLM output because I know what I’m going to find. False assumptions and hallucinations. Emphatic, staccato fragments. Excessive emojis :sparkle:. :rocket: It’s not just me—these are real patterns (:barf:). It takes like 5 seconds to add a quick CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md with a quick style guide, or even just “EMOJI ARE FORBIDDEN” and I find it makes llm output signific…

FWIW, I've been finding that ChatGPT doesn't use emoji at all when I engage with it like a pair programmer and bounce off design ideas, ask for implementation code, propose refactorings etc.

But when I ask it to do data analysis or modeling, the emoji are all over the place, yes.

(And judging by what I've seen on GitHub over the last year or so, I would never in a million years consider asking an LLM to write a project README or documentation unsupervised.)

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#259

Post by cpt_sobel »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #191
block_dagger wrote: post #25

I've started feeling slightly physically ill when I read Opus output for hours straight. This article rings very true for me. I've started complaining about it with my team; at least have a personal style guide in your agent rules that eliminates emdashes, the "it's not X, it's Y"s, the long lists of modifiers before the noun, using the word "land" to mean finish, etc. I hope this is just a phase of adolescent LLMs.

Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.

My non-English-native-speaker head of development, to whom I report, does 100% of his work using LLMs and doesn't even check if the code compiles, but somehow this isn't my biggest problem with it – it's the botspeak in the PR comments (or answers to my PR comments) that are so clearly not written by him, and the documentation that makes absolutely 0 sense sometimes even if I break it down. Just a word salad of "robust", "maintainable", "smoke test" that amount to absolutely nothing. And the "You're absolutely right, I fixed it" responses (narrator: he didn't fix it).

I used to have a lot of fatigue due to it until I stopped caring.

Re: I think I have LLM burnout

#260

Post by sph »

tayo42 wrote: post #122
Bratmon wrote: post #3

This is legitimately the reason I'm looking to leave programming. I got into programming because the problems of programming were interesting to me. But if the problems go from "figure out why this calculator is off by one in France" to "Get this LLM to stop spamming cutsey emojis", then maybe it's time for a career change.

Leave programing for what though?

Anything else, dude. Let’s do without the propaganda that programming is a cushy job, and any other job is menial underpaid grunt work.
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